Royal Ontario Museum

This guide to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto begins with a totem pole that arrived at a train station in the 1920s, sawn in half because it was too tall to travel any other way: the Pole of Sagaween, carved from a single red cedar by an artist named Oyee for a Nisga'a chief of the Eagle tribe. Once it reached the museum, staff faced an odd problem: nothing inside could hold something more than eighty feet tall. Three more poles, carved by Nisga'a and Haida artists, now stand beside it near the grand staircase.